Friday, July 11, 2008

Two English Bishops who were at GAFCON commend the gathering and its declaration

http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/2008/07/11/two-english-bishops-who-were-at-gafcon-commend-the-gathering-and-its-declaration/

[Anglican Mainstream] 11 Jul 2008--‘Find out what is pleasing to the Lord’ (Ephesians 5:10) ‘You hate my instruction and cast my words behind you’ (Psalm 50:17)

These two verses were in our minds over the last remarkable week of the GAFCON Conference in Jer usalem, attended by over 1,200 people, including nearly 300 Bishops from all over the world, chiefly from the provinces of Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Part of the joy of the conference was its make up of laity and clergy, women and men, from all the continents of our world. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, addressing the conference, referred to the ‘miracle of Gafcon’, describing it as part of God’s purposes for our church. It was extraordinary that so many people, from so many different parts of the world, had come together within the space of eight months’ preparation time.

There were Bishops from Nigeria, who had been recently consecrated and sent out into Muslim areas to plant new churches. There was the Province which represented the Western Nile that had seen 120 churches planted in the last 20 years, following the translation of the Bible into the Kukuwa language, a church which was made up of 70 per cent youth, whose cathedral had 1,200 children in the Sunday school, between the ages of seven and 14, where 60 per cent were below the age of 35, described by their Bishop as ‘praying hard, singing loud and dancing a lot’.

However, there was plenty of self- examination and criticism within the churches represented at Gafcon. All the way through the conference there was the question as to the relationship between the Gospel and Anglicanism, with the insistence that Anglicanism has been shaped by the Gospel, and that this must remain the case. In addition to the national and ethnic diversity, different traditions within the worldwide church were very evidently present from evangelical to catholic to charismatic. A theme throughout the week was given by superb expositions from Scripture, bringing us the ‘one stor y’ of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, one of the most power ful expositions being the last from Revelation 21, given by Archbishop Yong Ping Cheung, former Archbishop of the Province of South East Asia, who spoke of the ‘clear intention to erode and change the fundamentals of the Gospel’ being the challenge facing the Anglican Communion at this time.

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